Posted 2/04/2012 02:05:00 PM by Douglas

How adorable. Kids from the concrete empire want to know what Texas is like when you venture more than 100 yards from the offramp so bad, they take a class about it.

On-screen, in the opening scene of The Last Picture Show, the wind whistled through a lonesome streetscape, empty of everything save dust and desolation. As a teenage boy peered through the splintered windshield of a rusty pick-up, an unmistakable voice wailed on the radio.

"I remember this song coming from my brother's Philco radio. That's Hank Williams - the real Hank Williams - singing Why don't you love me like you used to? ," said Young, as the camera panned to reveal a deserted main street seemingly set in the middle of nowhere. "It really captures that country up there. What never stops is the wind."

The students in Young's "Texas Crossroads" course gazed silently at the cinematic imagining of Texas as a place of thwarted dreams and forlorn horizons. The week before, they had viewed a completely different portrayal of the Lone Star State: a scene from the 1956 epic Giant, which paints Texas as the "mighty colossus of the southwest, a land of infinite variety and violent contrasts."

In classrooms from Huntsville to Houston, Abilene to Austin, students are alternately studying, skewering and celebrating the enduring notion of the Lone Star State as a land of mythic proportions and mighty individualists.

Another Sam Houston class, "Texas History 398," deconstructs the concept of "Texceptionalism." A Rice University course, "Kickin' It in Small Town Texas," explores the cultural nuances of life "beyond the hedges."

Geez, what a bunch of pussies. There's more to Texas than watching Giant or The Last Pictures Show. Get your nose out of your own latte art and go try some BBQ in Lockhart, catfish in Alto, or even the Dairy Queen in Chillicothe. You can't get a degree in life experience.